All photos in this tutorial can be double clicked to be viewed in larger versions.
Shortcuts and menues I talk about in this tutorial will be for Photoshop 6.0 and newer versions of that.
You open your photo in Photoshop(Ctrl+O). Duplicate your layer(Ctrl+J) to make an identical layer of the photo. This is now called Layer 1.
First I want to make Layer 1 black&white. Make sure Layer 1 is highlighted on the Layers Palette and then you desaturate the photo (shortcut Ctrl+Shift+U). Layer 1 is now in BW.
I think the contrast in this BW photo don't look good so I want to adjust it. I add an Adjustment Layer to Layer 1 by clicking the black&white circle at the bottom of the Layers Palette and choose Brightness/Contrast. I adjust the contrast until I think the BW layer looks nice.
I think the contrast in this BW photo don't look good so I want to adjust it. I add an Adjustment Layer to Layer 1 by clicking the black&white circle at the bottom of the Layers Palette and choose Brightness/Contrast. I adjust the contrast until I think the BW layer looks nice.
Now I've adjusted the BW and the colour layer the way I want them and it's time to make some magic happen! First make sure you've clicked on the BW layer again. The Layers Palette should now look like on the print screen above. You should now have two Layers(Background and Layer 1) and two adjustment layers(Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation).
Now you make sure Layer 1 is highlighted on the Layers Palette. Then you go down to the bottom of the Layers Palette and add a Layer Mask(a square with a circle in it) to Layer 1.
Now you go to the Tools Palette on the left side and the Colour Palette. Make sure you have white selected as the foreground colour and black selected as the background colour.
You can now choose the Eraser Tool on the Tools palette.
You decide the size and softness of the brush up on the Menu line. I use a quite large brush to start with and later I will go over with a smaller brush on the small details and edges.
Press down the left mouse button and start erasing over the object you want to be in colour. You will now see the colour start to appear in your BW photo.
Don't worry if you erase outside the lines of your object. As you see on my image I have some orangecolour from the flower which is visible. I don't want it to be like that and want to add back black/white to the things outside my object(butterfly).
The cool thing I can do now is to go to the Colour Palette, use the arrow in the corner and switch to Black as Foreground colour. If you now try to erase over the object, you'll see that you reverse the erasing from earlier and add back the B/W.
I also zoom in on the image, and use a smaller brush on the Erase Tool to go over the edges of the object. This can take some time, depending on the details of the object. So by working like this, changing between black and white as foreground colour, and chaning the size of the brush, you 'll get a nice result in the end.
Here you see the finished result again. Remember to save it as a copy so you don't overwrite your original photo. If you save it as a photoshop file(.psd) you can also open it again later and continue your work.
Good luck!
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